Clifford Witting’s Measure for Murder (1941) belongs to that strand of Golden Age crime fiction whose pleasures lie as much in social observation as in puzzle-solving. One of the enduring appeals of the genre is the glimpse it can provide into an England now almost unrecognisable, yet still just within living memory. Here that includes the novelty of car ownership,…
Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution”: Truth, Lies, and a Perfect Performance Christie published The Secret of Chimneys in 1925 and you can read an amusingly scathing review here. I am sure others may have more positive things to say. But Christie also published something else that year – a short story that has had a remarkable second life …
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel here.) One aspect of the…
There’s something irresistible about a crime story set in a school or college. Like the classic snowbound country house setting, it offers the intrigue of a closed, insular community rife with underlying tensions, repressed emotions, and intellectual rivalries. There may be illicit liaisons, secret societies, cultist rituals, unrequited lust, and simmering passions. Academia promises a cast of eccentric characters full…
Felled by the dreaded lurgy in early January I was sidelined from my usual reading routine. It’s hard to concentrate when little spikes of fever send your mind swimming into the stratosphere. The symptoms weren’t that bad but the fatigue was real and concentration was not at peak performance. An Agatha Christie re-read was in order. I read seven of…
This is a review of a book I have not read that does not actually exist. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this dive into the golden age of crime and detective fiction. An isolated country house in winter and a cast of quirky characters none of whom are quite what they seem. There are family secrets, unrequited love and…
Always fun to find half-remembered books. One bonus of this decluttering lark is that you find so many of them. What to do? Choices: Keep: The book has an enduring value. While there is no more room you just have to hold on to this one. It’s either irreplaceable or just a core component of your identity and emotional furniture. …